10-2085 Protective Life Ins. Co. v. Hansen

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Insurance
Life insurance; reformation

Where the owner of a life insurance policy never effectively transferred ownership to the person whose life is insured, the subsequent change in beneficiary is ineffective also.

“[E]ven if we could somehow discover what Protective would have done had B&K been named an LLC, the proper focus here is not on what should have happened but rather on what actually happened. Hansen argues that because Protective should have accepted Culligan’s signature as sufficient to transfer ownership of the policy, we must find that B&K transferred the policy to McDonald. This is not a legal theory, and ‘what should have happened’ is not a governing standard. Instead, what matters here is what actually happened: Culligan signed a change of ownership form, Protective rejected it either rightly or wrongly (we will presume wrongly) and sent the form back to Culligan, Culligan never mailed the form back, and Protective never changed the owner of the policy. Absent some viable legal theory, we cannot simply unwind this series of events and declare Hansen the beneficiary of the policy.”

Affirmed.

10-2085 Protective Life Ins. Co. v. Hansen

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Griesbach, J., Bauer, J.

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